Forbidden Music (47 page)

The Academic Assistance Council of Great Britain (AAC) was set up in 1933 by William Beveridge, Director of the London School of Economics. It was meant to help place reputable academics, but the reality was quite different. Of the 2,200 academics leaving Nazi Germany and Austria by 1938, half went first to Britain, but the AAC dealt only with what it considered the ‘elite’, so that many ordinary teachers and researchers were never allowed to stay. By 1935, only 60 permanent university posts had been found for fleeing academics, including a small number of scientists. The AAC was under pressure from the Ministry of Labour to encourage academics to find employment in the USA, with only 31 refugee academics ultimately ending up in British universities.
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Internment

It was in 1940 that Churchill gave his infamous instruction to ‘collar the lot’, meaning that ‘enemy aliens’ were to be interned.
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These included male (and in some cases female) Germans and Austrians, but not the so-called 'Old Reich’ Austrians who held Czech, Polish or Hungarian citizenship. It also included Britons of German and Austrian origin, so that in a few instances Britons found themselves interned (or indeed deported) because their parents or even grandparents had settled in Britain. Until May 1940, ‘enemy aliens’ had been classified in one of the three categories listed as A, B and C. Those in category A were deemed an obvious threat and were already detained. Most able-bodied Jewish and political refugees fell into category B and were subject to employment and movement restrictions, while those in category C were exempt. Churchill's order resulted in 27,000 category B aliens, and many from category C being added to the category A aliens, already detained,

Hans Gál's internment memoirs
Musik hinter Stacheldraht
or
Music behind Barbed Wire
offers a vivid first-hand account of life in British internment camps, recalling his five months surrounded by despair, death and frequent
suicides.
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His own family was ripped apart: in 1942, his youngest son, unable to cope with the new life forced upon him, committed suicide, and his oldest son was deported to unknown shores during the months in which Gál was detained on the Isle of Man.

Jewish asylum-seekers, businessmen with Nazi sympathies working in Britain when war broke out, first- and second-generation Austro-German Britons, along with political refugees, were all thrown into camps together (Italians were placed in separate camps). As Gál explained, the cynical view among refugees was that Britain was preparing to present Hitler with all of his escaped Jews on a silver platter, once the country fell to Germany.
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The music that Gál composed in camps at Huyton (outside Liverpool) and Douglas (Isle of Man) does not reflect his mood of desperation. On the contrary, he wrote pieces to take people's minds away from the situation. He composed for whatever instruments were available, and when performers were released, transferred to other camps or simply deported, he rescored his pieces for new arrivals, or transposed them as the situation demanded. He described the guards as obtuse and often sadistic. The frequently cited ‘camp universities’ with lectures held by Nobel Prize-winning scientists and concerts by some of the greatest performers of the day, all of whom were interned together, reflect only a partial truth that belongs mostly to postwar British mythology. The lectures and concerts, the art classes offered by the likes of Kurt Schwitters and plays mounted by refugee actors and directors were, according to Gál's memoirs, far less of a feature of daily life than the unremitting tedium. Wellesz's Oxford University diary is empty from the moment he is interned until the week of 8 July 1940, with two consecutive entries that read ‘Schöne Müllerin – Zusammenbruch’, referring to a performance of Schubert's
Die Schöne Müllerin
, and the total mental breakdown which led to his being released after the personal interventions of Myra Hess, Vaughan Williams and others.

The Austrian pianist Ferdinand Rauter campaigned tirelessly after his own release from internment for freeing musicians who clearly posed no threat to the British public and who were sometimes young enough to be in danger of suffering permanent psychological scarring. Among this group were several young Austrians including Norbert Brainin, Siegmund Nissel and Peter Schidlof, whom Rauter managed to have released and placed with the Viennese violinist Max Rostal for instruction. Rostal was impressed enough by the youngsters to teach them without charge, and in 1947 he introduced them to the English cellist Martin Lovett, with whom they formed the Amadeus Quartet. Gál was also lucky enough to be released early and returned to Edinburgh in late September 1940 after suffering from an inexplicable skin disease.

During his internment, Gál worked with a group of writers and performers to put on an internment-camp revue entitled
What a Life!
for which Gál wrote the music, and among the humorous writers was the Schubert scholar, Otto Erich Deutsch. The first performance was such a success with both prisoners and camp personnel that Gál was persuaded to delay his release by one day so that a second performance could take place. Songs were bilingual and a taste of a verse in English translated by Gál himself from an original text by someone he identified only as ‘Hutter’ certainly implies a baffled incomprehension at locking up ‘Hitler's best enemies’.
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In truth, internment was standard in times of war and carried out by all sides, often with tragic consequences. Roosevelt's order for the internment of Japanese-Americans is copiously documented and the United States has been quicker than other countries in dealing with this dark chapter of its domestic history. Documentation concerning British internment that should have been released after 30 years remains embargoed to this day. But the Nazis also operated internment camps in addition to their many concentration camps. It was in such a camp, in the small Bavarian town of Wülzburg, that the Jewish, Prague-born composer Erwin Schulhoff died. He had been imprisoned, not as a Jew, but as a naturalised Soviet citizen, even though the camp in Wülzburg separated Jewish prisoners from other internees. His death from tuberculosis in 1942 was in the same year that the film star and opera tenor Joseph Schmidt died in a Swiss internment camp at the age of 38, proving that even the internationally famous matinee idol was not spared unsanitary and crowded conditions. There were also many deaths and suicides in French and British camps. Jewish inmates of French internment camps were regularly deported to the death camps in the East after the fall of France in 1940. The twelve-tone composer and protégé of Theodor Adorno, Erich Itor Kahn, and his wife, the Russian pianist Frida Rabinovitch, were relatively lucky. Having been shipped from one camp to another in France, they eventually managed, with help from the American Refugee Committee, to reach Casablanca and find safe passage to the United
States in 1941. If his music remains largely unfamiliar today, his view of the dilemmas presented to a German Jewish composer at that time is revealing:

Less fortunate was the violinist Alma Rosé (niece of Gustav Mahler, and daughter of Arnold Rosé and Mahler's sister Justine), interned in Drancy before being deported to Auschwitz. The librettist Richard Fall, brother of the composer Leo Fall, was also arrested in France before his murder in Nazi gas chambers, sharing the same fate as the composers Szymon Laks and James Simon along with Fritz Löhner-Beda, the librettist for Lehár's
Land of Smiles
and
Giuditta
.

Escape: France

Fleeing from Nazi Germany in 1933 to neighbouring France, Czechoslovakia, Italy or Austria was only a short-term solution. But unlike Czechoslovakia and Austria, there was less apparent sympathy in France for Nazi anti-Semitism. Indeed, France had been helping Jews flee from central and Eastern European pogroms with its Comité central d'assistance aux réfugiés juifs since 1928. There was broad establishment support for aiding German Jewish refugees from 1933, and for Austrian composers such as Toch and Schoenberg, France was felt to be a more secure refuge than a return to Dollfuß's corporatist dictatorship in Austria. French was also the most common second language for German and Austrian refugees, and this fact regularly tipped the balance in favour of Paris over London.

But like Britain, France too was suffering from massive unemployment; its musicians were reeling from the loss of work that came with the arrival of sound films, and as a result, life was especially difficult for fleeing musicians. German music was not appreciated by the broader French public, though
young French composers had greater sympathy for German modernist trends than their British counterparts.
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Refugee musicians did not form self-help leagues or societies such as those formed by German writers in French exile. Nor were they engaged to teach in institutions.
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If the British were fretful that, by hiring refugees as teachers, they were putting their native musical flower, ‘tender’ as it was, at risk from being trampled underfoot by better-qualified Huns, the French were sufficiently nationalistic to dismiss the idea of Austro-Germans teaching at their institutions altogether. With the exception of the teutophile, anti-Semitic Florent Schmitt and a small number of others, the French maintained the anti-German stance present since their defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.

As in Britain, official attempts were made to preserve an outward appearance of friendly cultural relations between Germany and France, often leading to excessive concessions being made to avoid harming international relations. In 1936, Hanns Eisler submitted several movements of an oratorio that would eventually become his
Deutsche Sinfonie
, with texts by Bertolt Brecht and Ignazio Silone, to the committee of the ISCM in the hope of having it performed at the 1937 ISCM festival in Paris. The composer Jacques Ibert headed the jury along with the ISCM President Edward Dent. Neither was instinctively sympathetic to Eisler's politics, and both were wary of offending the remaining German delegates (Nazi Germany had officially withdrawn its cooperation and started a rival organisation). In an effort to appear as non-partisan as possible, the ISCM committee suggested to Eisler that the vocal passages be replaced by saxophones – a suggestion that Eisler, unsurprisingly, did not take up.

The film industry provided the easiest means for composers to enter French musical life. The Hungarian pupil of Hanns Eisler, József Kozma, later Joseph Kosma, arrived in Paris from Berlin in 1933. His first score, following the success of his 1936 hit-song ‘Au jour, le jour; à la nuit, la nuit’ from Jean Renoir's film
Le Crime de Monsieur Lange
, was
La grande illusion
(also directed by Renoir) in 1937, followed by
La Règle du jeu
in 1939. In due course, Kosma became the father of postwar chanson with such hits as
Les feuilles mortes
and
Les enfants qui s'aiment
set to texts by Jacques Prévert. But other composers would also find work in France's film industry, Eisler himself with
Le grand jeu
in 1934 and
La vie est à nous
in 1936. Paul Dessau, another frequent Brecht collaborator, composed scores for
L'or dans la rue
in 1935,
Taras Bulba
in 1936, and
Cargaison Blanche
in 1937, and even the future Hollywood great, Franz Wachsmann, later known as Franz Waxman, worked in Paris on the films
La petite de Parnasse
and
Un peu d'amour
(1932) and
La crise est finie
and
Mauvaise graine
(1934) prior to leaving for America. Of all
of the composers seeking refuge in France, only a few, such as the Hungarians Joseph Kosma and Imre Weisshaus (later known as Paul Arma), and the Polish Webern pupil René Leibowitz, remained in France during the years of the Vichy regime, while the Austrian operetta composer Joseph Beer remained in hiding until the end of the war.

Most German and Austrian composers either left France or were deported to the East. Beer remained too damaged through his experience to participate in postwar musical life and any of his prewar operettas that found postwar productions were mounted without his involvement. His family, along with his regular librettist, Fritz Löhner-Beda, had all been murdered. He remained a virtual recluse in the South of France until his death in 1987. During the Occupation, Jacques Prévert was able to feed film work through to Kosma, under house arrest in France's Alpes-Maritimes region, which was then published under the names of other, non-Jewish composers. Arma, also hiding in the South of France, compiled political songs held today at the Musée régionale de la Résistance de Thionville, and composed a song cycle entitled
Les chants du silence
setting poems by Vercors, Éluard and others. In the immediate postwar years, Leibowitz, who would become the teacher of Boulez and Henze (among many others), fostered an interest in Schoenberg among younger composers in both France and Germany.